Mike Celizic

It’s never a good idea to have the stars of a live performance watched by tens of millions die on camera. And when fatal injuries happen during your showcase events twice in three years, you’d better fix the problem. If you don’t you’ll find you won’t have any events.

Horse racing had better wrap its collective brain around this simple truth. In the space of two calendar years plus two weeks, it’s broadcast the fatal injuries of two of its stars live to vast audiences. At the Preakness in 2006, it was Barbaro suffering multiple breaks in his hind leg. The colt soldiered on for months before its doctors finally put him down. With that memory still etched in sharp relief on the nation’s consciousness, another huge audience watched Eight Belles go down on two broken forelegs in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. This time, there was no vigil, no prayers for a horse’s recovery, no get-well cards sent by the thousands to a veterinary hospital. Instead, there was just a horrible reality TV show that ended with a dead horse on the sport’s most famous race track.

If there was shock at Barbaro’s fate, there was outrage at Eight Belles'. Suddenly, critics who had been writing bright and breezy celebrations of an ancient sporting tradition decided enough was enough. They added in the death by euthanasia of George Washington at last year’s Breeders’ Cup and decided the sport had reached a level of carnage that left no alternative but to shut it down.

The New York Times sounded that trumpet. PETA dug its spurs into the mess: Horse racing must be banned, Eight Belles’ jockey must be suspended, criminal charges must be considered.

In a word: whoa.

I’m not going to argue that horse racing is the most civilized recreational pursuit in the Republic. Animals are bred to beyond the limits of their own mortality for the sole purpose of running around in circles so that people can bet on which one will get to the finish first. And, while the horses are born to run, there is the bothersome fact that it is necessary to put small people with whips on their backs to keep them focused on their goal.

Even so, the animals are treated exceptionally well, especially the running money factories at the top of the industry. Yes, there is a problem with the fragility that’s been bred into the animals. But the solution isn’t to ban a sport that’s been practiced for as long as horses have been domesticated, which goes back thousands of years.

Regardless of what you think about the morality of  the activity, you are talking about a very sizeable industry that supports thousands of jobs. You can’t simply end it and tell all the people who depend on it for their livelihoods that you’re sorry, but they’ll just have to find something else to do.

This isn’t bear-baiting or cock-fighting, no matter what The New York Times says. The object isn’t to kill an unoffending animal. The object is to run it successfully in a handful of races and then sell its stud rights for millions of dollars. Nobody wants investments worth that much to up and die.

This is what horse racing has to address before it doesn’t have a sport. Lose a couple more horses in the next two big races — the Preakness and the Belmont, which are also the only two most people watch — and the industry won’t have to worry about being banned. It won’t have an audience that will notice.

I don’t think that there is yet a danger of viewers tuning out in fast numbers. If Big Brown can win the Triple Crown, it will overshadow Eight Belles’ death and revive the sport. But only if all the horses get around the track with all their limbs still in the minimum number of pieces nature intended.

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